What is business process management (BPM)? It’s a dicipline to design, control, analyze, and improve operational business processes allowing process improvement methodology and enabling technology to be affectively combined, automating execution and coordinating human participation.

We already heard about previous process-centric management approach like six sigma, and lean in the past. So, what makes it different? You could say that BPM is helping them by embraces them and enables them with new tools and capabilities.

Business Process Management (BPM) is useful, powerful and potentially very accessible. But, with so many analysts, consultants, publications and vendors weighing in with their own perspective and opinions, it can be very confusing. The talk about BPM is also frequently tied to SOA (service oriented architecture) because they complement each other. Hence that SOA is also quite hype around big enterprises.

So now, are you interested to know more about BPM? You might want to check out this website, The BPM Dummies. It’s not a all in one website about BPM. This is a website of a book, called BPM Basics for Dummies.

Wait a minute, there’s a catch on the website. Because it’s not telling you to buy the book but to download the e-book for Continue reading →

Last week I was invited to University of Indonesia as a guest lecturer at the Psychology faculty. I was at two consumer psychology classes. The presentation was an overview on how to make a great facebook application in order to help them on their assignment. Which is to made a concept of a facebook application that promote a faculty’s event called Dapur (Tenda Purnama) 2010. The facebook application should have a great consumer experience design. So no techies here, but it should give you a clear view about facebook application.

Too bad I can’t access facebook on the class, so no demo there. It’s hard to explain these kind of stuff with out watching it on action 🙁 I’ve included some links on the case studies if you want to try the application or for further reading.

The presentation started by explaining the current condition of facebook application. This is the agenda:

The Stat of facebook application

The Apps

Basic Interactions

How to Make The Apps

Case Studies

Some Key Notes

From my perspective there are 4 ways to make a facebook application. It doesn’t always have to be from the tough way of start from scratch like what Burger King did with the Whopper Sacrifice.

Use existing apps

Connect existing services Connect existing services

Start from scratch
– Just apps
– Custom apps Custom apps

Collaborate with existing apps Collaborate with existing apps

Note that sometimes the facebook application doesn’t stand alone. A facebook page or a web links maybe required depends on what the application objectives.

Many have argued that the Internet renders strategy obsolete. In reality, the opposite is true. Because the Internet tends to weaken industry profitability without providing proprietary operational advantages, it is more important than ever for companies to distinguish themselves through strategy. The winners will be those that view the Internet as a complement to, not a cannibal of, traditional ways of competing.

This is another group presentation we did on Corporate IT Strategy class. The presentation will walk you through a paper called The Strategic Potential of The Internet, Strategy and the Internet by Michael E. Porter published by Harvard Business Review or the HBR. Since all HBR paper is a looooong one, you might find this helpful.

Still though, read the whole paper to get in touch with the very inspirational minds of Mr. Porter. You can find the paper here:

This paper talked how people especially business so eager to jump into the intenet and made a big deal out of it. Not to mention to be the first mover myth. Remember the big dot com falls? But by doing so they had forgotten their strategy and just hoping everything will be settled after they used the internet.

Instead of doing so, Mr. Porter suggest that we use the internet as a complement and that the internet hype (and so called the new economy) is making its way to the end. And that every thing with an “e” must be merged into the business strategy. Eventually the “e” factor will become Continue reading →